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MILLICAN'S SECRET TO SUCCESS Clay Millican will be the first to tell anyone who'll
listen that his crew chief, Mike Kloeber, is the secret to his success.
With Kloeber's guidance, the Drummonds, TN-based driver raced to three
IHRA Top Fuel wins last season on his way to earning Pro Rookie of the
Year honors. On Sept. 23 this year, Millican went one better by clinching
the 2001 IHRA Summit Top Fuel Championship with one race still on the
calendar.
On top of that, when Millican crossed the finish line in the final round of IHRA's Autumn Nationals, he made a little drag racing history. The win over Louie Allison also marked Millican's sixth straight Top Fuel victory, breaking a 26-year-old record set by none other than "Big Daddy" Don Garlits himself. It's easy to give the driver the lion's share of attention and congratulations in situations like this, and no doubt Millican deserves whatever accolades come his way, but Kloeber certainly deserves recognition, too. There's just so much that can go wrong in drag racing and for Kloeber (and crew) to prepare a car that can go 24 straight elimination rounds without a loss is really quite incredible. Kloeber is a tactician who's always thinking, always searching for that extra edge because he knows everyone else is searching, too. Still, once he's found what he's looking for, he's not overly paranoid about sharing the process. He says it's the combination of what he knows that helps make Millican go fast, not any one part of the puzzle. That search for answers and openness with the results was evident at
Rockingham, even with a record and the championship up for grabs. Kloeber
had enlisted the help of John Moloney of the Auto Research Center in
Mooresville, NC, to set up extremely high-speed cameras to capture the
launch of Millican's and other Top Fuel competitors' cars and images
of the cars as they passed a fixed point downtrack at full song. With
up to 1,000 frames per second at their disposal, Kloeber and Moloney
hoped to slow down the process enough to see the subtle flexes and twists
that the tires and chassis go through on each pass. Kloeber also was
testing a new rear tire design from Goodyear, with slightly stiffer
sidewalls and a harder compound.
The testing was a qualified success. Both Kloeber and Moloney seemed pleased with the filming results, but said they could see where the process could be refined and improved with more time and -- of course -- more money. They envision an opportunity exists for gathering more results next spring at the traditional testing session held primarily for NHRA nitro burners at Phoenix. Regardless, the Werner pit area was open to any competitors or crew members who wanted to check out the slowest slow-motion available, and guys who obviously have watched hundreds, maybe thousands, of Top Fuel runs (yours truly included) repeatedly said it was some of the most amazing footage they'd ever seen. The tire testing was promising, too, Kloeber said, but it also would benefit from a dedicated testing session beyond race conditions. Still, just his willingness to try new and different things in the middle of a campaign said volumes about his approach to racing. I also thought it was good for the IHRA, too, to have such a forward-thinking mind in its midst. Although the "slow-mo" technology has been employed by select IRL teams in the past, Moloney said Kloeber is the first drag racing crew chief to express interest in what it can offer. For an IHRA team to be a leader in applying new technology to the sport has to be a positive development for the sanctioning body. "Everybody tends to just put a wing up there and clamp it down whether it's cool, or hot, or whatever, and that's the way they're going to run," Moloney said. "That's why I love working with Mike (Kloeber), because he has an open mind about the aerodynamics." Moloney's definitely not the only one who loves working with Kloeber. Just ask Millican. "Crew chief of the year! Right here, crew chief of the year," Millican stated. "He's made this car so easy to drive I feel like I'm not working hard enough. I can't say enough about Mike Kloeber. He's just the best, man!" Right now, with a record-setting season under his wrenches, that's
a hard sentiment to argue with.
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